Stuff I know about nowadays that contradicts past arguments

I used to argue "battles should have strategy and tactics". While I believe this is still true, what I didn't know at the time is that designing bosses where you have to attack anything other than the boss itself in order to do indirect damage or trigger some event does not add to the challenge, strategy, or fun to it. I also learned that having players play targeting games and guessing games doesn't work very well (at least not in the OHR where turn order gets really finnicky when doing spawning and attack trigger stuff).

I know this because I designed bosses like this and they were all terrible and I still apologize to this day for possibly misleading people whenever I argued angrily on Castle Paradox.

I think a lot of the reason we design a gimmick to utilize the attack command to try and make it less boring to use is because we usually design a game where that's all you have and an obligatory healer, and then you get more spells from there. The problem is that we don't finish games, so we never get to have fully realized battles. I still think it's possible to do a game where you have bare bones attack command and no abilities, but it'd be best to avoid bosses in the beginning.

I think the other reason we try to design battles to be more elaborate than they probably should be is because of the OHR itself. It's so easy to hold down space bar due to lack of tactile feedback in the engine, and the problem is more with that and not the actual game designs. Plus it's usually an experiment to try and get the most out of the battle engine, but that tends to lead to bugs and situations where either the battle is won in some strange way or the battle becomes unwinnable period.

tl;dr version: This is not a "recommend me some games that fit a certain criteria" thread since I'm not interested and won't play what you suggest.

I refer to this type of battle as a puzzle battle. It's a battle that doesn't follow the regular rules of the game. In my opinion, to develop tactics, players need to be well-informed of the rules and expectations of the game system. That way, they can plan proactively instead of playing reactively.



The reason that spacebar-holding is such a prevalent problem probably has to do with bad game balance and design. Many OHR games have an overabundance of spells/techs, most of which are useless or redundant. If players have a small list of highly useful spells, they will be more inclined to use them. Any spell which can be described as "useful under specific circumstances" will probably never be used.

Also, battles need to be harder. Make the enemies have lots of HP and plenty of hard hitting attacks. That way players need to use their buffs/debuffs and prioritize their attacks. That is the making of tactical battles. Battles should be unwinnable via space-bar holding. Or at least that's my two cents.

I beg to differ. I'll use Spellshard's Disrupt Undead attack as example. Under normal circumstances, the spell does nothing. As soon as theres Undead, it hits hard. It was quite useful despite that limitation, and I used it very often.

Any spell useful under specific circumstances can be used a lot depending on those circumstances. If a spell can only be used on Undead, and theres only one Undead Type in the game, your obviously not going to use it as often as spells that work all the time.



This is evident in many games. Balancing stats is arguably the hardest thing to do when it comes to games. They have to be consistent with EVERYTHING. My past games had terrible balance. Cardians Of Lore is the only game where I actually tried my hardest to keep everything balanced. Even at level 30+, you only have 340+ Health, whereas most games you could be well over the thousands, like Forsaken.

Design is a tough thing. It's not easy to formulate a battle that requires strategy. Most battles are bland, with no strategy but Spacebar holding. Not many games break up the monotony. I'd love to be able to make unique battles, but with the OHR's limitations, it's difficult. Maybe Battlescripting in the future will be able to break this up.

This is the kind of stuff I would used to say without thinking of how well it actually holds up in practice. I'm talking about making the player do pointless stuff that doesn't really break tedium or (and sometimes adds to it) and is just a more complicated way of doing what they would be doing anyway.

No, seriously. Even the best designed OHR games will end up using the default attack quite often. I decided to embrace the idea instead of rejecting it as part of my game designs.

I think there's a difference between "using the default attack command often in battles" and "holding the spacebar"...

The only time that literally holding down the spacebar will do as good or better than actually using your character's special attacks would be in a badly-designed game where your special attacks aren't any better than the attack command, or if they are it's by such a marginal amount that it doesn't make much of a difference (especially if they cost more MP than they're worth or don't even work on a lot of enemies.) I've pretty much only seen this situation in really bad games and old unfinished demos, as far as I can remember... in pretty much everything else, there's going to be at least a few special attacks that are a better option than just mashing the spacebar as soon as your character's turns come up.

There are situations where you can win a fight with just default attacks even in a good game, though. Fighting random encounters, for example... some enemies just aren't enough of a problem to justify wasting MP on wiping them out quickly with special attacks, especially if you have a limited supply and need to save up for boss fights or tougher random enemies later.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

What I'm trying to say is that there'll always be some form of spacebar holding, even in well designed games that utilize other commands because the engine makes it such a fast, easy option so it shouldn't be something to be alarmed about.

This is true. Even in the classic Final Fantasy games, I'd often default to holding/tapping the A button when fighting the rank-and-file enemies. I'd even have my mage characters whip out their pansy weapons for no reason other than to speed the battle up a little bit.

Here's a great example: Chaos, the absolute last boss of Final Fantasy, you know? I beat him in a similar fashion. I buffed my physical fighters with all my buff-y spells and went bashing with my basic attack nonstop. Only occasionally did I have to heal, and black magic was doing so little damage, I actually gave my black mage a buff and had him assaulting the final boss with knives.
So I beat Final Fantasy and its final boss by spamming basic attacks, and I still consider it a great game with a good combat system.

I'm not about to advise a "Let's Go Back To The Basics Contest." But I will take Newbie's advice and reconsider how my game's OHR battles are set up and executed.

A non-OHR tangent:
Outside of the OHR and classic RPG styles, I much prefer RPG battles with Action Commands, like the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi RPGs. It's impossible to just hold a button and breeze through battles, but it's far from boring and I actually considered level grinding to be enjoyable in these games.

You can get avoid this by not having any easy enemies. You could make battles less frequent but have them all be life-threatening. Having easy enemies that you grind through is a waste of time anyway.

Just a heads up: Mages aren't whipping out the attack command because enemies are easy to kill.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you insinuating that mages use the attack command because the OHR engine emphasizes speed, and attacking is the fastest ability to activate?

If that's the case, then the mage's spells should be powerful enough to reward them taking the extra time to select one. Or the enemies should be strong enough that everyone needs to maximize their damage output, therefore mage's need to cast spells.

Please explain!

Baconlabs was talking about FF1. Mages in that game need to conserve their spells for when they're really needed and when you do attack with them, they're not going to kill a single thing. I have to fact check stuff.

Also, nobody is saying that the attack command should have better DPS or utility than more costly abilities. We really shouldn't even be discussing this but we are somehow.

That's true. Although you don't have to make a game like Final Fantasy. Each dungeon in Final Fantasy has probably around 40 random battles. You could make the encounter rate such that it only has 5 or 10 random battles, but make them all very difficult. Then mages couldn't/wouldn't conserve their MP. Or even more radically, just make MP refill after every battle.

But yes, to make an RPG in the style of Final Fantasy 1, spacebar holding is inevitable.



I guess I'm not sure I understand what this thread is about then. I'll just bow out here before this gets anymore confusing.

No offense, but this tells me that you haven't really played FF1. The game actually punishes you for holding down the attack button for one thing.

It's about how I used to preach "battles should be complex, tactical, and interesting!" (keep in mind this is mostly about bosses and assumes default OHR battle engine) before I realized that they have to be done right in that aspect. I learned that making battles too gimmicky and not enough substance doesn't really make a battle any more interesting. Wide pool of abilities even at the beginning is better even if it means hitting the ability ceiling earlier.

I am sure gimmicks and puzzles can still be done, but after my failures with the concept I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

Ok, I'll be the one to cause some raised eyebrows and claim that this is one of the problems with Chrono Trigger - some of the bosses feel like gimmicks. It's funny for beating Ozzie, but things like the Son of Sun, or the guy in the watery cave (Heckran...? something like that) are just annoying. I feel like I'm forgetting some others, but it's been so long.

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I am Srime

Nobody should ever claim I've never played FF1. I've beat the NES version probably a dozen times. I almost beat it once with a party of all Black Mages but got bored. It's like my favorite game. I even beat the terrible Labyrinth of Time on the PSP version.



I assume the punishment you are referring to is that you can target enemies that your other party members have already killed. Although that isn't really too relevant here since OHR doesn't do that.